Reminder: All of Black Mirror's Episodes Take Place Within the Same Universe

Season four of Black Mirror boldly goes where no season of the dystopian series has gone before. There’s the Charlie Brooker-created show’s first foray into black and white with “Metalhead,” the first time a story was set inside a space epic with “USS Callister,” and the first explicit acknowledgment that all of Black Mirror is taking place inside a shared universe thanks to the season’s last episode, “Black Museum.” There have been plenty of clues that all of the episodes over the years have been linked — the song that plays at least once a season, all of those Victoria Skillane Easter eggs — but Brooker had yet to confirm or deny the connected universe theory himself.

In one of the behind-the-scenes featurettes Netflix released to go along with season four in January 2018, Brooker sat down for a quick chat about the latest six episodes. In addition to commenting on why he decided to create the bleak series, he discussed how “Black Museum” changes things.

“People used to say to me, ‘Are these all set in one shared universe?’ And I’d say, ‘Absolutely not,'” he recalled. “But now for the first time, I think one of our stories explicitly starts referring to things that happened in other episodes.”

The episode in question is, of course, “Black Museum,” which follows a young woman (Letitia Wright) as she explores a creepy museum full of artifacts from high-tech crimes that have happened throughout multiple seasons of Black Mirror: the iPad from “Arkangel,” the bee drone from “Hated in the Nation,” and the bloody bathtub from “Crocodile,” among many others. The museum is a true house of horrors — or “a walk down memory lane,” if you ask Brooker — and it finally gives fans of the show a concrete link between all the different storylines.

In a second featurette specifically about the “Black Museum” episode, actor Douglas Hodge — who plays sleazy museum proprietor Rolo Haynes — doubles down on what Brooker said about the shared universe: “This is one of the few stories, I think, that does acknowledge all the other stories and all the other worlds that have been created.”

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